CHAPTER & VERSE — Brave New World

Rufus McCrae: Evening, you lovely lot, and welcome to Chapter and Verse, my reading group down the pub, where the beer's warm, the arguments are hot, and nobody's on happy pills except possibly the barman. Tonight's book is about a world where everyone's cheerful all the time, so naturally I've invited the most miserable people I know. Doc Sullivan, our science correspondent, here to tell us how much of this nightmare already has a research grant. Margaux Delacroix, who has read every European philosopher who ever ruined a perfectly nice afternoon. Arthur Nightingale, who read the last chapter on the number thirty-eight bus and went three stops past his own front door. And Murray Kessler, our money man, who brought tonight's book because he reckons it's either a warning or a business plan, and he won't tell us which. The book is Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, nineteen thirty-two. And up in the balcony, where they've sat since before decimal currency and haven't cracked a smile since: Humphrey Thwaite and Mortimer Finch.

Humphrey Thwaite: Before decimal currency. I was here before the pub had a roof.

Mortimer Finch: He was here before the beer. Been sending it back since nineteen seventy-one.

Humphrey Thwaite: It was warm, Mortimer.

Mortimer Finch: So's a bath. You don't drink that either.

Rufus McCrae: Right. Murray, you brought it, so you're on the hook. You're the only man at this table who reads balance sheets for pleasure, so pitch me a nightmare where nobody suffers. I've had a lovely week and I don't want it ruined.

Murray Kessler: London, six hundred-odd years from now. They count the years After Ford. Henry Ford, the motor car man. Babies are grown in bottles and sorted into castes, Alphas at the top, Epsilons at the bottom, and every one of them conditioned from the bottle up to love their station. Sex is recreational, shopping is a civic duty, and if you feel a bit flat you pop soma. Perfect high, no hangover. No war, no poverty, nobody lonely. And I'll be honest with you, Rufus: the first time I read it I was twenty-two, and I thought, where do I sign?

Rufus McCrae: And now?

Murray Kessler: Now I'm sixty-one, and I think, where do I invest?

Mortimer Finch: There it is. Ten pages in and he's buying shares in the hatchery.

Rufus McCrae: Margaux, you're doing the face.

Margaux Delacroix: I am doing the face because Murray has just described paradise, and the genius of the book is that it is paradise. Orwell, seventeen years later, gives you a boot on a human face forever. Huxley gives you a warm bath forever. And the warm bath is much harder to argue with, because nobody in the bath wants to get out.

Humphrey Thwaite: I got out of a warm bath once. February, nineteen sixty-eight. I've never forgiven myself.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur, you're the best reader of a page we've got. Does it work as a story, or is it a very clever pamphlet with a bloke in it?

Arthur Nightingale: It's lopsided, I'll give you that. Chapter one is literally a factory tour, the Director walking students round the baby farm, and you're a good while in before the story properly starts. But then John turns up. The Savage. Raised on a reservation in New Mexico, outside the system, and he's learned to read from one book, a battered complete works of Shakespeare. He walks into this perfect, frictionless world quoting Othello at it. That's when the pamphlet starts breaking your heart.

Rufus McCrae: And he nicked the title off Shakespeare and all. Doc, as our science man, you'll know the Huxleys were practically a laboratory with a family tree. Who was this fella?

Doc Sullivan: British science royalty, basically. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog, the man who went out and fought Darwin's fights in public. His brother Julian became a famous biologist and ran Unesco. His half-brother Andrew won a Nobel for working out how nerves fire. Aldous meant to go into medicine. Then at sixteen, at Eton, an eye infection left him nearly blind. He learned Braille. Medicine was finished. So the one Huxley who couldn't look down a microscope became the one who imagined what the microscope would do to us.

Rufus McCrae: That's a hell of a consolation prize.

Doc Sullivan: And darker underneath. His mother died of cancer when he was fourteen. His brother Trevenen took his own life when Aldous was twenty. By the time he invented a world that abolishes unhappiness, he'd had a good long look at it.

Mortimer Finch: Well. That explains the pill. Go on, Humphrey, tell them the Eton bit, you've been sitting on it all week.

Humphrey Thwaite: After Oxford, half-blind and skint, Huxley took a job teaching French at Eton. Couldn't keep order to save his life. And one of the boys in his class was a lad called Eric Blair.

Rufus McCrae: Don't.

Humphrey Thwaite: George Orwell. The two great nightmares of the twentieth century, and one of them taught the other his French verbs.

Mortimer Finch: Bet Orwell sat at the back.

Humphrey Thwaite: Didn't matter where he sat. Huxley couldn't see the back.

Rufus McCrae: Margaux, he didn't write it in Surrey, though, did he?

Margaux Delacroix: The South of France. Sanary, on the coast, in a few months of nineteen thirty-one. And he started it as a send-up. He wrote to a friend that it was a novel about 'the horror of the Wellsian Utopia.' H.G. Wells, who promised that science would make us clean and rational and happy forever. Huxley's answer was: yes. Exactly. Now look at it.

Murray Kessler: And the Ford business, that's real, isn't it?

Margaux Delacroix: Very real, Murray. He'd been to America in nineteen twenty-six and came back rattled by the advertising and the relentless good cheer. So in the book they make the sign of the T instead of the cross, and they say 'Our Ford' where we'd say 'Our Lord.'

Murray Kessler: Sharpest prophecy in the book, from where I sit. He didn't predict a dictator. He predicted a brand.

Arthur Nightingale: Look at the names, too. Bernard Marx. Lenina Crowne. Polly Trotsky. And the man who runs Western Europe is Mustapha Mond, named, Murray, after Sir Alfred Mond, the chemicals magnate.

Murray Kessler: They made the boss of the world a chemicals man. Finally, a realistic novel.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur. The big one. Chapter seventeen. John's finally standing in front of Mustapha Mond, the one man in the world who understands the whole system and runs it anyway. Set it up and give it us straight.

Arthur Nightingale: Mond has just explained, very calmly, very reasonably, that they gave up God, and art, and danger, because people are happier without them. And John says this. … 'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.' … 'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence. … 'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last. Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.

Rufus McCrae: … Thank you, Arthur.

Humphrey Thwaite: 'You're welcome.' Two of the most frightening words in the language.

Mortimer Finch: He offers the lad cancer and the lad says yes please. And God help me, I'm on the lad's side.

Rufus McCrae: Not everyone's been as moved as Mortimer. Margaux, who's had a pop at it over the years?

Margaux Delacroix: Ireland banned it in nineteen thirty-two, the year it came out. And in America it has never stopped being challenged. The American Library Association had it at number three on their most-challenged list in twenty ten, and the reasons logged were: insensitivity, nudity, racism, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit.

Mortimer Finch: That's not a complaint. That's the blurb.

Rufus McCrae: Fair, though, on the racism?

Margaux Delacroix: Partly, yes. The reservation chapters have aged badly. He writes the Pueblo people as a spectacle for tourists, which is how the World State sees them, but the book doesn't always see past it. Arthur has a better notice than mine.

Arthur Nightingale: The review by theft. Kurt Vonnegut, of all people, said he 'cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.' Murray, you'll appreciate that.

Murray Kessler: That's not plagiarism. That's a supply chain.

Humphrey Thwaite: Huxley always insisted he'd never read the Russian. Orwell didn't believe a word of it.

Rufus McCrae: Murray, you've read the foreword. Who wrote the real one-star notice?

Murray Kessler: The author. Fourteen years later, new foreword, nineteen forty-six, Huxley gives himself a kicking. He says the defect of the book is that the Savage is offered only two alternatives, 'an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village.' And then: 'If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative.'

Mortimer Finch: Imagine reviewing your own book. Humphrey's been reviewing his own life for eighty years and it's still two stars.

Humphrey Thwaite: Generous. I'd have said one.

Rufus McCrae: And what was the third alternative?

Murray Kessler: Sanity, more or less. Which is a terrible title for a sequel.

Rufus McCrae: Right, I want a proper row. Murray, you said 'where do I invest.' Make Mond's case. Nightmare or dream?

Murray Kessler: A dream with bad PR. Mond says it himself: 'The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get.' Show me one government in history that delivered that. No war, no famine. And every one of us goes home tonight to central heating and a telly, and we'd fight anybody who tried to take them off us. We already chose comfort. We just don't like seeing it written down.

Margaux Delacroix: Central heating is not soma, Murray. Comfort is not the crime. The crime is a comfort engineered so that you are incapable of wanting anything else. They had to make 'mother' a dirty word. They had to abolish the family, the old books, solitude itself.

Murray Kessler: And the people are happy! Even the Epsilons are happy!

Margaux Delacroix: The Epsilons are happy because they were starved of oxygen in the bottle so they'd be too dim to mind. Doc, tell him.

Doc Sullivan: She's right, I'm afraid. Chapter one: 'the lower the caste, the shorter the oxygen.' And there's a rumour in the book that Bernard is runtish because someone put alcohol in his blood-surrogate, thinking he was a Gamma. That's deliberate brain damage, done on purpose, as policy.

Murray Kessler: … Right. The Epsilons are a harder sell.

Mortimer Finch: First time I've seen Murray lose a negotiation to a bottle.

Murray Kessler: But don't sit there and tell me you'd choose John's life. The lad ends up whipping himself by a lighthouse while crowds turn up in helicopters to watch. That's your freedom?

Margaux Delacroix: I would not choose his life. I would choose his right to it. That is the whole difference, and it is everything.

Rufus McCrae: Humphrey, you've gone quiet. That's never good.

Humphrey Thwaite: Mond's the most honest man in the book. That's what frightens me. He's read Shakespeare. He keeps the Bible locked in his safe. He knows exactly what he's taken from them, and he's decided they're better off without it. A tyrant who hates you, you can fight. A tyrant who's read everything you love and kindly decided you can't be trusted with it…

Mortimer Finch: … is a librarian.

Rufus McCrae: Doc, this is the bit that keeps me up. How much of it's come true?

Doc Sullivan: Less than you'd fear, more than you'd like. The headline trick, Bokanovsky's Process, one egg budded into as many as ninety-six identical embryos, 'ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines,' no, thank God, we can't do that. But the first IVF baby was born in Britain in nineteen seventy-eight. And the slogans. 'One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments.' 'A gramme is better than a damn.' Any doctor who's ever written a prescription for a sad patient on a Friday afternoon reads those and winces a bit.

Rufus McCrae: 'Ending is better than mending.' That's my favourite. Murray, that one's yours, surely.

Murray Kessler: That's not dystopia, Rufus, that's my retail portfolio. They teach the kids in their sleep that old clothes are beastly so they'll throw them away and buy new. That's not satire. That's a good quarter.

Mortimer Finch: My wife darned my socks for forty-one years. Mending's better than ending. Stick that under your pillow.

Rufus McCrae: Doc, he went further than writing about drugs, didn't he?

Doc Sullivan: He did. Twenty-odd years later he took mescaline and wrote The Doors of Perception, which is where The Doors got their name. And on the twenty-second of November nineteen sixty-three, dying of cancer, he asked his wife Laura for LSD. A hundred micrograms. He died that afternoon. Same day as Kennedy. Same day as C.S. Lewis.

Mortimer Finch: So he took the soma at the end.

Humphrey Thwaite: It's not the same, Mortimer. He wasn't trying not to feel it. He was trying to feel all of it.

Rufus McCrae: Humphrey, you had Orwell sat at the back of the class. Did the pupil ever hand in his homework?

Humphrey Thwaite: Nineteen forty-nine. Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four and sends a copy to his old French master. And Huxley writes back, polite, generous, and then he can't resist. He says this: 'Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.'

Mortimer Finch: Marked his homework. Thirty-two years late, but marked it.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur.

Arthur Nightingale: And in nineteen eighty-five, Neil Postman, a media scholar in New York, put the two books side by side and wrote this. 'What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.' … And: 'Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.'

Rufus McCrae: … Everyone at this table has got a phone in their pocket. Including me.

Margaux Delacroix: We did not need a World Controller, Rufus. We volunteered. … And the soma fits in a jacket pocket.

Rufus McCrae: One thing to carry home. Murray, you brought it. What are you leaving with?

Murray Kessler: That comfort isn't the enemy. I'll die defending central heating. But comfort you're not allowed to refuse is a cage with nice cushions. Check the cushions now and then.

Rufus McCrae: Margaux, the European view, in one breath.

Margaux Delacroix: A person is made of what they are permitted to suffer for. Take that away and you don't get a happy person. You get a pleasant absence where a person used to be.

Rufus McCrae: Which leaves the balcony. Gentlemen.

Humphrey Thwaite: The title. Everyone knows it, nobody knows where it lands. The Tempest. Miranda, fifteen, raised on an island, never seen another human being but her father. A boatload of drunks and traitors comes ashore, and she says: 'O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in't!' … And her father, who knows exactly what those men are, says four words. 'Tis new to thee. … That's every old man who ever watched a young one fall in love with the world. You don't correct them. You let them have it. It'll hurt them later, and the hurt is theirs, and it's worth having. … When Eleanor died, the doctor offered me something to help me sleep. I didn't take it. Not courage. The grief was the last thing of hers still alive in the house.

Mortimer Finch: Alright, Humphrey. Drink your pint, it's going warm. … Which you'll complain about. … Forty-one years she darned my socks. I've still got one pair she did. There's holes in the darns now. Every soul in that World State would tell me to bin them. Ending is better than mending. … No, it isn't. That's the book. Don't ever let anyone sell you a life where nothing's worth mending.

Rufus McCrae: Brave New World. Lopsided, I'll give you that: a long factory tour, a reservation that's aged badly, and a hero you'd cross the road to avoid. Doesn't matter. It's over ninety years old and it's the most accurate book about my phone I've ever read. Here's my connection. Every pub in England calls last orders. Nobody needs it; the landlord could pour all night. But the bell's the point. Something ends, you walk home in the cold, and you miss each other. That's what the World State took away: the bell. Read it if you've ever scrolled till two in the morning and felt nothing. Read it if you've got a pair of socks you won't throw out. Read the actual book, though. Don't just listen to us bang on about it. That's Chapter and Verse. See you next week.